Passive preamp

OP, What do your ears tell you ? BTW, this topic has been discussed, ad nauseam. As some say, it can work, and as others say, it does not. As audphile 1 stated above, everything matters, and as he suggested, you can eliminate your Frida ( sorry, I had to ), and the use of an additional interconnect, going direct from your M3. People are very opinionated here, including myself, but I use my ears to determine what is enjoyable, and preferable, to me. My best, MrD.

If your system is passive friendly (and you can search here to see what that means) a passive line stage is your best bet. There is no need to throw away gain when it’s not needed, I’ve had some very good active preamps up to around 8k and all of them were shown the door by one or another passive device. If you truly need gain, then disregard the aforementioned and buy the best active preamp your budget will allow.

I have a Schiit Freya + I occasionally use (well worth the $800 I spent on it) and with my class A mono's I prefer it in the active mode using the LISST  Tubes. However the passive mode is very musical also. It will be system dependent and I like having a little gain. 

Excellent idea to try the M3 as the pre going directly to my amp.  I would at least have something to compare against the passive pre. Unfortunately, I do have more than the one source (turntable and other) otherwise I would stay with the M3.  Happy to notify in this thread what my results but but it'll be a couple of weeks before I have things set up.  Cheers!

As you have more than one source and are forced to use a preamp, you need something better than that piece of Schiit preamp. With that Schiit in front of Bricasti dac you pretty much wasted your money. You’ll know what I mean when you run M3 direct.